He was the driving force behind the Chinese agency Turenscape and was renowned for his effective solutions for urban resilience in the face of climate change. The architect, landscape designer and urban planner died suddenly on 23 September 2025 in Brazil while attending the São Paulo International Architecture Biennial. He leaves behind his ingenious ‘Sponge City’ principle, which involves surrounding cities with water and mangroves to combat soil impermeability, pollution, and global warming. Yu Kongjian first attracted the attention of public authorities in the early 2000s as a landscape artist, paving the way for the completion of several hundred projects in China alone.

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Yu Kongjian was born in 1963 in the village of Dongyu in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, into a farming family. He obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in landscape architecture from Beijing Forestry University. In 1992, he began pursuing a PhD at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, USA. He defended his thesis on ecological security patterns in southern China in 1995. Following several years of employment with the American firm SWA Group, he returned to China in 1997, where he co-founded the Institute of Landscape Architecture and the School of Architecture at Peking University. ‘He devoted his life to promoting his discipline, landscape architecture, and trained many professionals,’ read a statement from the university following the architect’s death.

Yu Kongjian, publisher of the scientific journal Landscape Architecture Frontiers and author of more than 300 scientific articles and 20 books, devoted his life to landscape conservation. ‘Landscape should be used for survival,’ he told the American Association of Landscape Architects in 2008, ‘not to put it under a bell jar, but to dispel the pointless “city versus landscape” dichotomy and design intelligent, attractive porosity.’ His research gave rise to the Sponge City concept. In December 2022, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui devoted an issue to buildings ‘in extreme environments’ (No.446, December 2022–January 2023), and the editorial team saw no reason not to include the modern, permeable city in this collection alongside hostile deserts, glaciers, and tundras. In an article by architect Olivier Greder, Turenscape was described as an office aiming to ‘reform the environmental and urban approach that China has been pursuing for some thirty years, which has generated urban forms highly vulnerable to natural disasters with rainwater drainage systems that become saturated almost immediately’. In this context, Yu Kongjian’s work was not only innovative, but possibly lifesaving. ‘The sponge city is primarily a response to conservation and survival,’ the author continues. ‘It is implemented to combat urban surface flooding and related water management issues, such as urban runoff purification, peak runoff mitigation and water conservation.’ The system combines a set of so-called “natural” solutions, such as absorbent surfaces, swales, trenches, wetlands, landscaped retention basins, phytoremediation areas, and underground networks that interconnect the various infrastructures.’

Benjakitti Forest Park, Bangkok, Thailand, 42,3 hectares, 2024

His thinking was based on the concepts of ecological security patterns and adaptive urban planning. Through his ‘Big-Foot Revolution’, he advocated for resilience, functionality, and sustainability over ornamentation, redefining landscape and urban design as the ‘art of survival’. Extending beyond cities, he developed the concept of the ‘Sponge Planet’, advocating the restoration of wetlands and coastlines to stabilise the global water cycle and provide a comprehensive response to the climate crisis. ‘Today we bind natural feet in the city with fashionable tiny high-heeled shoes and we build a 500-year flood-control dike made of concrete to surround the city and keep it distant from the water. We build a fully controlled storm-water management system that does not allow the reinfiltration of water to the aquifer before being flushed into the ocean; we replace native “messy” and productive shrubs and crops with fancy flowers that bear no fruit, support no other species, and serve no function other than pleasing human beings; and we uproot hardy wild grasses and replace them with smooth ornamental lawns that consume tons of water. […] It’s time for a change.’

Sanya Mangrove Park, Hainan, China, 10 hectares, 2019